The Jump-Off Creek Read Free Page A

persuading the cows single file ahead of him along the narrow track in the bluff. She watched the dog herself. Until seeing this one, she had not ever seen a dog do a true job of work, only Lars’s foolish retriever bringing up a dead barn swallow or a hatchling quail from the stubble of the barley field, carrying the bird clamped between his jaws and then letting it down happily in the yard. Mr. Whiteaker’s dog was big-headed, mud yellow, ugly. There was a hitch in his gait, an old or a false limp. But she liked to watch his steady, inconspicuous effort, keeping the cows together and headed right.
    When the mule had brought her up to him, Mr. Whiteaker dropped his leg down in a stiff way and toed the stirrup. He sat hunched under his oilskin, looking off vaguely into the trees behind her. “Some people get a dread of high places,” he said in a low voice. He had a gesture, ducking his chin like a horse trying to get loose of the rein, and he did that now. She could not tell, yet, whether it was a habit of discomfort or of temper. “I knew a cowboy once who wouldn’t ride a horse that stood more than fifteen hands. He said he started to sweat if he got any higher than that.”
    She made a thin, brief smile for his sake, and pinched the collar of Lars’s coat tight with one hand. She had been up on the roof of her dad’s barn without misgiving, that was about her only experience with highness. She would not say that, if she could keep from it.
    He ducked his chin again, shifted his weight. “If you think you
would want both hands, ma’am, I’ll hang onto your string for you.” He said it in a low way, glancing aside: she saw in his face that he was wary of her.
    She had not ever found just the right manner for these occasions. She smiled carefully, looking past him along the narrow notch of the trail. “I have never had any fear of highness myself, Mr. Whiteaker,” she said.
    His shoulders moved slightly inside his dirty corduroy coat. “All right then,” he said. He turned and nudged the bay down the little notch, and the mule went behind him without pressing.
    Away from the trees, the wind drove the rain ahead of it. Lydia pulled her hat down on her ears, hunched her shoulders inside the collar edge of the coat. She looked down once toward the distant pencil stroke of the creek and after that kept her eyes on a place just in front of the mule’s stride, watching the puddles that riffled cold and brown in the wind.
    â€œOkay, ma’am?” Mr. Whiteaker had hipped around on the saddle to look back at her. His shout sounded reedy, thin. She nodded once and smiled in a bare way and he turned frontward again, settling his shoulders against the wind and the rain. Ahead of him the cattle went along quick, anxious, pussyfooting. They had, maybe, a dread of high places. She held her mouth and looked fixedly past them, where the trail went steeply down across the face of the ridge and finally under the trees.
    The mule jerked his head suddenly, but it was Mr. Whiteaker who shouted, whatever word or name it was blown thin on the weather. She looked and saw him put one hand on the neck of the bay horse, and the bay wallowing under him as if his touch had done that. Her heart pitched too: she heard or felt the little sideslip of gravel. He yelled again, maybe at the horse, and the bay shoved ahead, bunching his big hindquarters in a grunting lunge. The edge of the trail slumped under him, but he was already down the notch, jumping ahead in a jolty high
canter, when the rocks scrambled loose down the long bluff. The mule flung up his head, backsquatting as though he wanted to sit. Lydia put her hand flat on his jerking neck and held him steady. Three or four feet were gone out of the trail. The broken edge was stubbled, rocky. She looked at it.
    Mr. Whiteaker called something to her, she could not hear what it was, and he swung down to loosen the cinch on his